What They Said In Sweetgum County They were the old men sitting in a dimly lit room wrapped in a girdle of smoke, filling ashtrays emptied by other people. They sat drinking their big label beer. It was a breezy, sunny day outside. They were the old women gathered in the kitchen, drying dishes by […]
Miriam Steinbach – Fickle F
Fickle F I always find you in the basement, FFeasting on crooked shadows.Your hooked spine floats above your feet,spinning frantically in framed heat A forest dance.A fire song. Sweat finds fortitude on your brow,you wear must like perfume. Fraud, Feeble, Foul,Freak, Flirt, Failure. Failure.Failure.Failure. Each fistful of words a spiked clubswinging for my ribs.You open […]
df parizeau – curios ii
Bio df parizeau is a Pushcart nominated, Scottish/French-Canadian editor/writer, who still has his wisdom teeth. Their work can be found in: Funicular Magazine, Chapter House Journal, perhappened mag, Rejection Letters, and Daybreaking Zine amongst others. Twitter: @belowtheeaves Website: dfparizeau.com
Russell Willis – Two Poems
Tabletop Musing Tracing the grain of a tabletop andstools lost in their past while recon-structing their time and imaginingthe angle of the saw cut and how old and how big and whether fel-led after a full life or that it was itstime because they needed to build this table and these stools just thentracing the […]
Eric Robert Nolan – The Rough, Violet Stone
The Rough, Violet Stone Life is too short for accord.Bestow to me, please,the heretic’s hectic direction,the rapt and the agitatedcompulsions of the outcast.For if he walks long enough alonethe pariah’s heart will ever ignite to fervid purposelike fire discovered by an exiled progenitor. Grant to me the ardent discernment of the lost— the faith that […]
Leah Miller – Smokers
Smokers 1. Tie, mango, train – three words with no apparent connection. The nurse tells me to remember them for later. I want to do well. These people have caused me a lot of trouble—four CAT scans, two biopsies, and a confirmation from the Mayo Clinic: I don’t have lung cancer. But what about dementia, […]
Kenneth Pobo – Two Poems
Dulcet’s Still Life We talk on his porch about cars backfiring, organ music, and kidney stones. Fresh lemonade sweats in glasses he inherited from his grandmother. A bowl of peaches teases Cezanne out of the grave. Dulcet Tones And Proof In Geometry class, shapes keep numbers in their pockets. I didn’t know how easily numbers […]
Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon – Summer in the Sixties: Slow Roads
Summer in the Sixties: Slow Roads Cooped upin our green Morris Minor.Eight long, sticky hours,Leicester to Merthyrfor our summer holidays. Mum baits Dad.Their tight voiceswhisper cross words.Gwyn grabs my book.It’s not fair.I hate boys,brothers worst of all. Stuck in a traffic jam,I need a wee.I wriggle and sweatour car crawls on. At long last, a […]
Carol Louise Moon – Death of a Pine
Death of a Pine The pine—at one moment seen asan inexhaustible life force—wasin the next moment seen sheddingits needles, bark and any senseof evergreen health. It had seemed to be a tower ofstrength against an ever-increasingdrought in a land which—in bettertimes—had seen heavy rains withabundant wild flowers and water grass. The pine, now rotted within, […]
Simon Perchik – You reach for December, rip the page off
You reach for December, rip the page offletting it lay crumpled on the wooden floorside by side the days, hours, minutes still shaking from the final week you triedto bring them back to life as tears̶ this calendar can no longer hide your grief gives way from under the great weightthat turns snow to stone […]